Why Call Tracking Software is Important for Sales & Marketing

Ever played paintball in the dark? Tied your shoelaces with one hand? Put money in one of those claw machines that grasp meekly at the assortment of trinkets below?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you know what life is like for any sales agent working without call tracking software.

A call tracking solution provides you with the data you need to make informed decisions with both sales and marketing.

With accurate insights and reports into the marketing channels driving calls, your sales team's performance on the phone, and the quality of your leads, you get a clearer view of what works and what doesn't.

Call tracking software illuminates the murky waters of ROI, lead quality, and a host of vital metrics that are so crucial to successful sales teams in the modern age.

In this blog, we'll help you understand how call tracking software works and why it's so effective for sales teams in every industry. Let's get started.

So, What Is Call Tracking Software?

While your sales agents and leaders are making calls, creating strategies, and handling prospects, your caller tracking software works around the clock to automatically retrieve and analyze the data behind those outcomes.

Let's take a quick look at the data made visible by call tracking software, and how you can use it:

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This data is super handy for your marketing and sales team because it allows you to assess your advertising campaigns and see which strategies bring home the bacon. But, conversely, it also enables you to make tweaks to the ones that aren't hitting the mark as they should.

The OG version of call tracking relies on physically surveying customers and getting them to fill in forms that indicate which campaign has sent them your way, for example, Facebook, Google, Instagram, word of mouth, etc. Then, prospective customers from each of these campaigns get tallied up to inform future strategies.

Calls tracking software in the digital age is a far simpler and more efficient way to go about things, and marketers can instantly identify prospects in their respective campaigns.

Not only that, but you can find out how long they spend on your website, which pages they visited, how long they spent on it, and what content got them to stick around.

But it goes even deeper to let you know which paid search keyword of your PPC campaign encouraged them to make the call in the first place. It also stores and records all your calls so you can revisit them for further insights into your interactions.

5 Business Opportunities Made Possible With Call Tracking Software

1. Know what marketing channels drive phone calls

Once you pin down the marketing channels that get that phone ringing, developing strategies to leverage that knowledge becomes a cinch. This means you can approach prospects with laser focus and a clear vision for how you're going to tailor your marketing and advertising material.

Trying to piece together a strategy without call tracking is the equivalent of trying to eat ice cream while riding a mechanical bull. It has the potential to make you look very silly while being incredibly unproductive.

Caller tracker software pulls back the veil to let you see how many leads are coming in from calls and the channels responsible for generating them. By attaching a unique number to each channel, you can track which one has initiated the contact.

It also lets you determine the quality of your leads by counting the number of calls and their duration, which ultimately leads to better conversion rates. The lead score on converted calls is 65% higher than those that fail, and keeping tabs on who to target is cash money when it comes to ROI.

2. Calculate and boost marketing ROI

SEO and PPC are your guys when it comes to achieving excellent ROI, and they just so happen to be the critical components of an effective call track software. Digital channels can provide both short-term and long-term value for results-driven companies.

Calculating your ROI is easy because you'll be able to see exactly where your clicks and calls are coming from and where to invest your marketing budget. The ROI on your PPC campaigns is all there in black and white, keeping you well away from the red. And that's being conservative.

Click-to-call is another cheat code for boosting ROI. With mobile becoming increasingly omnipresent in our lives, there has never been greater traction for companies looking to garner engagement.

On average, click-to-call has the potential to increase your ROI by a staggering 143%. Those are big numbers. Further research suggests that click-to-call rates can be as much as four times more effective than online conversion rates, and a click-driven call is between 5% and 25% more likely to find success.

3. Be prepared for every phone call

Look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it? Or just let it slip? You can't expect your calls to be successful when your team's palms are sweaty, their knees weak, and their arms heavy-Mom's spaghetti.

Every single call you receive should be treated as a chance to either build the brand or make sales, and inbound call tracking holds the key to conducting conversations that end in sales.

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Call tracking software gives you a birds-eye view of your prospects' buying habits, personalities, location, and heaps of other valuable details. But it's up to you to use the data provided to your advantage and to shape the nature of these conversations.

You need to be a beacon of light from which all information flows and be able to answer all queries succinctly and accurately. And that's where the beauty of call recording comes in. Being able to revisit calls means you can formulate the best possible answer to an array of FAQs and even the more obscure ones.

4. Keep your sales team sharp

There are parallels between a high-performance sales team and the ones we see in professional sport. It takes a blend of art and science combined with metrics and methods to extract the most out of the talent at your disposal.

Do customers seem engaged in the call? Are they showing intent? What is the call duration? How quickly does the team respond to missed calls?

Less than a third of sales teams are motivated and engaged at any given time, putting a massive dent in productivity and sales. So it's on you to call the plays and provide them with a strategy rooted in the data to make sure you're getting consistent, cohesive performances.

Call tracking services analyze data from your teams' conversations to show you how effective they are and exactly where they need to improve. Use the group's competitive spirit to your advantage and encourage them to dunk on the Lebron James types by explaining why they're so successful and how they can replicate that.

5. Gain valuable insights about your customers

Customer insights are like gold for driving sales, and when you know who they are and where they've come from, you can begin to understand what they need and how you can give it to them.

Call tracking, call monitoring and call analytics combine to paint a beautifully detailed portrait of who your best leads are and whether they deserve your precious time. Without these insights, all your leads are essentially an aggregated finger painting bound for the bin, and that's going to do some real damage to productivity, sales, and any other relevant metric.

6 Benefits of Caller Tracker Software

1. Tracks and records calls automatically

Tracking your calls by campaign shows you how many leads are popping up over the phone and which of your channels have guided them safely to your doorstep. Never again will you pay for crappy AdWords that don't work or watch your budget evaporate into dead-end strategies.

Recording calls is one of the simplest and most effective ways of ensuring their quality. As the old Japanese adage goes, ‘if a tree falls in the forest, but nobody sees it happen, did the tree really fall?'

Probably. But now, you don't need to take people's word for it because you can go back and run the rule over every call that your team makes to see how well they follow the game plan. It also gives you the opportunity to assess the quality of your leads through first-hand interpretation of call data with your call tracking app.

Automatically recorded calls are big time-savers, but they also help you to gain a deeper understanding of what your customers are asking for and what they expect from their interactions. Qualifying leads and training your sales team to be the most badass on the proverbial block are two of the most significant benefits of call recording.

2. Highlights which paid and organic campaigns are working

We've already outlined how critical a call tracking system is for measuring the success of your paid campaigns, and there is a reason why it's such a game-changer.

Being able to gauge the effects of your campaigns at each stage of the pipeline allows you to adapt your marketing strategies, so you don't spend the next six months wondering where the hell your budgets disappeared to.

At this point, not deploying call tracking software is akin to gross negligence on the part of any marketing manager, or it's some form of corporate sabotage. Organic campaigns may be more of a marathon than a sprint, but you'll still be able to see where your traffic is coming from, where they are spending their time, and which keywords are doing the business.

Ever heard of seasonality? Aside from sounding totally made up, seasonality refers to fluctuations in your traffic that match up year on year. Using call tracking software, you can identify exactly why that is and build more competitive pages that get traction year-round.

3. Feeds quality assurance and sales team training

The wealth of analytics at your fingertips will always be a more than worthy ally in your efforts to train a badass sales team. Call monitoring plays a major role in laying the foundations of quality control and ensuring that your lofty standards are met at every turn.

So how can sales call tracking software meet your quality assurance KPIs?

• Efficiency. By boosting productivity through automation like click-to-call.
• Impact. Track campaigns and get real-time feedback from customers.
• Effectiveness. Identify your traffic sources and see where you're relevant.
• Customer service. Customer database detailing interaction history, activity logging, etc.
• Safety. Map customer journeys and ensure a positive experience at each touchpoint.

Taking a deep dive into recorded calls does two important things. Allows you to identify any trends in call quality spikes or drop-offs and to address them directly with qualitative and quantitative data that you can take into one-on-ones or team meetings.

Training your elite team of sales superstars becomes infinitely more manageable when you have the data to back up your constructive criticisms or changes to your strategy. Eventually, you will have a core set of concepts to build training sessions around while being constantly updated with new material for future integration.

4. Enables efficiency and scalability

Efficiency is a big part of what makes call tracking software so attractive to sales managers. They can let go of the reigns a bit and focus on the bigger picture without having to worry constantly about whether their team is being productive.

There are two ways it can improve your efficiency without you even batting an eyelid.

• IVR or Interactive Voice Response is an automated command protocol that lets customers navigate menus and direct their own calls with voice or keypad prompts.
• Click-to-call is a delight for any sales team, and it's a feature that is driving productivity in teams across the country. It works by having an agent simply click the number they want to dial, and it's estimated as much as 70% of consumers make use of this marvelous button.

And if you're looking to scale the automation and ability to create a vast, detailed database of customer contacts means you can operate as a company with many times the workforce of what you have currently.

Managing these leads is a critical ingredient in scalability, and the bigger you get, the more important they become. Call tracking software ensures your VIPs get the special treatment by routing them to places they'll find the person to help them.

5. Enhances lead quality

If the quality of your leads is bad, you're going to tank a lot of valuable hours into going insane and probably bust. You need to be nurturing them with continued, value-driven communication until they're ready to take the buying leap.

Phone call tracker software gives you the tools to track every conversation you have with your leads, and within those calls are hidden the tasty insights you're looking for. As they travel through the sales funnel, you can add more information and further insights to help them along to the final stages.

This is another area where call monitoring flourishes because, by the time you get to the point in your funnel where a phone call takes place, you've already put so much TLC into nurturing them that ruining the call would be catastrophic. But if you prepare your team sufficiently using both successful and unsuccessful overtures to guide you towards your best possible approach, your chances of conversion go way, way up.

6. Connects with VOIP and CRM

Call tracking software plays very nicely with other software that provides complementary services, and the best example of these friends is VoIP and CRM. Both of them bring their own set of special powers that mingle to form a comprehensive customer relationship solution.

This iconic trio can add extra muscle to your existing systems, irrespective of which one you're already using. Here's how.

• Better Management Systems

With VoIP, managers can access vital metrics for each team member, including the number of hangups, average call waiting time, and average call time. This makes it easy for managers to identify areas that may need some work or which ones are to be lauded.

• Superior Customer Service

Your customers are going to love all the extra attention they get, and so are you. CRM call tracking software has automation that creates tickets, redirects call and logs every conceivable detail about your customer for better all-around support.

• CLA (Closed Loop Analytics)

CRMs are excellent at analyzing consumer behavior, customizing marketing material, and boosting conversion rates. This ‘closed loop' is the sharing of valuable data between your sales and marketing departments.

• Collecting Call Data in Real-Time

VoIP and CRM integration for calling gives you a comprehensive look at all your data and logs details from your conversations, like which numbers are used, call length, and other insights.

So, How Much Does Call Tracking Software Cost These Days?

Depending on how much automation power you need, you may want to sprinkle a little CRM into your call tracking software mix. If your budget is down bad, then it may even be worth your while to try a free call tracking software, but it's highly recommended that you stick with a paid plan that allows you to grow.

Call tracking software with decent functionality will usually start somewhere between $35-50 per month/per user.

But you can expect to pay all the way up to about $150 for more users and more features. Later plans are traditionally for more established companies that have already experienced some growth.

CRMs that give you call tracking capabilities probably have a host of other features, too, so you can expect to pay a little more for them. The better ones will start anywhere from $75-150, which will rise depending on which pricing tier you select.

If a straight-shooting call tracking software is what you're after, then we should look at some options.

*Pricing as of June 29, 2021

Implementing Your Call Tracking System

Purchasing and implementing call tracking systems should never be rushed into, and there are a few things to consider before putting a ring on it. It has to do all the things you need it to do at a price that makes sense for the business.

How flexible are the payment plans? Does the feature set allow you to scale adequately? Get your sales team involved and get their takes on the pros and cons.

Once you've identified a plan from a provider you like, the onboarding can begin. Here's where you need to start familiarizing the team with their new shiny toy. Have them watch some demos and have a Q and A session to iron out any kinks and gauge how well they understand user experience.

If your teams have experience using call trace software, the onboarding shouldn't be a problem, and you can start coaching them with basic trial and error on all the tools and automation. In addition, most solutions have excellent material on their websites to make sure you're on track, so be sure to consult those if needed.

Then get them geared up for a full practice round to gauge their proficiency. This can take a couple of days or a week, but it's best only to remove the training wheels once everyone has their balance. But after that, you're golden.

Conclusion: Need A Call Tracking Software? We've Got That And So Much More

It's absolutely no secret that the best call tracking software can totally revolutionize the way you attract, nurture, and build long-lasting customer relationships that form the foundation of a successful business.

Ringy is far beyond your average call tracking software. It's a seamless, unified system that incorporates sales and marketing tools to power your team in every aspect on their way to smashing KPIs.

Ringy is an easy-to-use, cost-effective, and straight-up epic addition to any sales team. Get in touch with our team, and we'll create a demo to show how we can take your business further.